It's that time of year again. We're getting close to the end-of-year holidays. People are busying themselves with what they wanna buy for Black Friday, and get their kids their Xmas presents (and for those of you who celebrate it, Kwanzaa as well). It is at this time that I want to promote my Holiday Economic Support Initiative.
I started this campaign around 2016, promoted in the aftermath of the uprisings in Ferguson, the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and many of the others that have fallen due to the extremes of police brutality, and the systemic racism that plagues our society. If you didn't feel like marching in the streets, as you might feel intimidated by your workplace, or just couldn't risk losing a paycheck as the sole breadwinner for your family, I wanted to create an alternative means for us to fight back. We can still participate in the movement, but don't necessarily have to take to the streets to do it. As I've learned in my own activist experience, not every soldier has to take the same battlefield to fight.
The Holiday Economic Support Initiative in not a boycott per se, but a divestment from the system of oppression that we currently live in. We use our dollars to invest in OUR OWN businesses & entrepreneurs, and financially support them. We love to constantly complain about not having our own businesses, especially ones that service our neighborhoods, but rarely do we financially support them on a consistent basis. You also have those fake @$$ n*ggaz that'll talk shit about Black businesses having poor customer service, but will continue to spend their money with 'alien' businesses that don't ever treat you with respect, or them fake @$$ 'woke' ppl who will spout off rhetoric about supporting a Black-owned business...go ONE time...and then act like they did something important. This is NOT that type of gesture. This is an ideologically strategy used to bolster our businesses & entrepreneurs, and provide them with the support that they so rightly deserve.
If you want to participate in the Holiday Economic Support Initiative, you can participate via social media, and use you social media powers/influence to help promote those businesses and entrepreneurs that you know & follow. Use either of the two hashtags #HolidayEconomicSupportInitiative or #HESI, tag a business or entrepreneur that you know, and help promote their product/company/business to your followers. Everybody needs a little help with promotion, especially if you don't want to seriously come out of pocket with it. Some businesses & entrepreneurs may not have the financial means to pay some outrageous fee to promote their business, or their products. This is a strategically grassroots way for us to promote our entrepreneurs & Black-owned/Latino-owned businesses to the masses. The Initiative lasts from Black Friday, all the way up until New Years Day of the following year.
Please use the hashtags to promote any businesses & entrepreneurs that you know. I will include my own works into this campaign. If you are worried about the "supply chain slow down" that's affecting most of the country (if not, the world), my books are ALL available in eBook format, so you can easily download them, instead of having to wait to get the physical copy. They are available through Kindle, Nook, Kobo/Kobo+, iTunes, Scribd, and internationally through Tolino and Vivlio.
So, for this year, and hopefully beyond, don't spend you money with the big box stores and major corporations. Spend that money with your own. Support the small businesses. Support your local entrepreneurs. Buy Black. Buy Brown. Shop Latino. Shop local.
Keep the fist raised.
#AlwaysOnMyLiteraryGrind
